#Way to the woods e3 android#

But clunky controls, technical issues, and dull presentation swiftly bring me crashing back down to wherever the hell this is for possibly the worst boss fight yet. There's a dramatic panning shot after I beat the second boss - a big-ol' black cylinder named Tower - which reveals a landscape covered in loops and ramps and collectibles, and for a moment it feels like it could work, perhaps in a universe much kinder than ours. I couldn't help but notice that the skill tree I mentioned earlier contains an unlock for automatic combos, and I'm beginning to see why you'd want the game to fight for you. Armed with this knowledge, I was able to beat Ninja despite the best efforts of a lock-on camera which routinely loses track of targets, and a dodge-roll which can't dodge anything. I mistakenly assumed that I'd need to time my parry with incoming attacks, as you do in every sensible action game under the sun, but it turns out you just need to hold the shoulder buttons – both of them, annoyingly – until you get hit and you'll automatically counter seemingly anything. Shortly afterward, a helpful tool tip informs me that Sonic can parry in Frontiers… sort of, but when Siri says parry, she actually means block. Ninja's attack hit boxes could hit both sides of a barn, so he quickly turns me into mush as I wrestle with the controls.

#Way to the woods e3 android#

Oh god the boss battlesĬombat goes from boring to frustrating when I run into Ninja, a taller android blob and the first of three bosses I encounter in this demo. It is dramatically less interesting when forgettable android blobs pop out of the ground in the middle of nowhere just waiting to be one-hit for no clear benefit or purpose. Now for my money, Sonic's homing attack is most interesting when it's woven into platforming as a way to chain attacks to bridge gaps and keep your momentum. There are more moves and upgrades to be had, but for now it's all homing attacks, all the time. Later on I spend some skill points – in an honest-to-god skill tree in a Sonic game – on a Cyloop move which lets me ensnare stuff with circles of light, but I really only break out the Cyloop for enemies and puzzles that clearly require it. The open world feels woefully lacking in things to do or even see, and what's there is often actively worsened by the open-world structure.Ĭombat, for example, mostly focuses on homing attacks and a basic follow-up combo, at least at first.

This makes it impossible to get into any sort of flow state.

Sonic Frontiers briefly comes alive when I can chain flashy set-pieces together, but the small platforming challenges found around its world just feel like normal 3D Sonic levels arbitrarily broken into 20 sections with miles of ugly nothingness separating them. Of course, this runs the risk of the world feeling empty and lifeless, especially if it's unpleasant to look at, and especially if there is absolutely nothing between those interesting bits. So what do you do? Well, you could scale the world up to suit the character's movement speed by putting all the interesting bits really far apart. But if your character can go really fast, your average open world would probably feel really small. One problem is that, as Siri has established, Sonic has to go fast. When Sonic Frontiers was first announced in 2021, I was tentatively excited, but also unsure if the mechanics attached to the character would be a good fit for an open-world game.